I would have thought that a huge company like EA, with their marketing budget and whole teams of PR geniuses could come up with a better way to market stuff than trying to piggyback on the street cred of indie developers.

That pretty much sums it up.

Its all good and well that (twitter celebrity) Notch can call EA out for "methodically destroying gaming". But, it isn't particularly relevant to this issue. Not every Indie developer gets as much publicity as Minecraft did and I'm pretty sure that there are a huge number of indie developers who work just as hard. So, EA may well be snide and aggressive when it comes to business. But, if independent developers can benefit from it, then surely its something to support.

EA is a business first and foremost, they have to look at better ways on how to expand a profit and this is DEFINTELY going to work, games with lower budgets are the new "in" thing at the moment and people are buying them.

Why shouldn't EA get in on this?

"Notch can call EA out for "methodically destroying gaming"

The same Notch who uses horrible coding, spent more time on holiday than working on the game while the community had no communication on when another update would be, failed to deliver most of the content he promised AND charged for an alpha and beta? If anything, he's done more harm in the long run to the indie scene than EA will.

EA is a business first and foremost, they have to look at better ways on how to expand a profit and this is DEFINTELY going to work, games with lower budgets are the new "in" thing at the moment and people are buying them.

Why shouldn't EA get in on this?

"Notch can call EA out for "methodically destroying gaming"

The same Notch who uses horrible coding, spent more time on holiday than working on the game while the community had no communication on when another update would be, failed to deliver most of the content he promised AND charged for an alpha and beta? If anything, he's done more harm in the long run to the indie scene than EA will.

He may well have charged for an alpha and beta, but he at least let all those playtesters get the full game for free. Notch came up with something that people wanted, and then found out the problems associated with not giving the entitled "ME, ME, ME!" internet generation what it expects RIGHT NOW.

My own definition of Indie matches that of Mode 7. "Independent of publisher", which means that in my eyes there is nothing wrong with this promotion other than it looks quite cynical. But then, anything that gets those games noticed is probably a good thing. Personally, I would want to strangle someone after 10 minutes of Deathspank, but there are seemingly people out there who liked it. More exposure is usually of benefit to small developers.